Mobile computing and communications devices, such as laptop and notebook computers, personal digital assistants, and mobile phones, frequently incorporate high-capacity storage components, on which confidential data may be recorded. Being relatively small and lightweight, it may be inevitable that these devices are subject to loss and theft, providing miscreants with opportunities for invasion of privacy, identity theft, and espionage.
In general, a storage device is configured with numerous addressable physical storage locations on which respective data blocks may be stored and accessed. Although allocated and accessed in use on a random-access basis, data blocks typically are represented on storage device as a sequentially-addressed logical array. Such allocation and access schemes tend to result in efficient operation of storage devices, but also may be prone to security breaches, for example, using disk recovery software illicitly.
Encryption mechanisms have been developed to mitigate harm resulting from compromised storage components. Such mechanisms may be physical or virtual; may be implemented in hardware, in software, or in a combination thereof; and may use one or more keys to encrypt, for example, a file, a data volume, a logical disk partition, or a physical disk.
Although access to the encrypted data may be denied without the corresponding encryption key, it may be possible for a determined miscreant to discover a concealed key or password stored on the disk, or to intuit a successful decryption attack using a number of cryptanalysis and investigative techniques. Some security schemes may be circumvented simply by removing a storage device from its host platform and connecting it to a foreign platform. Also, complex storage security and cryptography schemes may be vulnerable to failure due to disuse, to irretrievable data loss due to simple drive controller failure, or to an inadvertently lost or forgotten password or encryption key.
Systems and methods are needed to overcome the above-noted shortcomings.
Features, elements, and aspects of the present invention that are referenced by the same numerals in different figures represent the same, equivalent, or similar features, elements, or aspects, in accordance with one or more embodiments.